YMMV / Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories

• Adaptation Displacement: Most people have experienced the PlayStation 2 remake and its remasters while not even bothering with the Game Boy Advance original, if they're even aware of it at all.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Naminé just relegated to be the game's Damsel in Distress, or is she actually a physical abuse victim? Most people think the symptoms are there and the game vaguely suggests it.
• Annoying Video Game Helper: Donald Duck randomly casts Fire, Blizzard, Thunder, or Cure. The three attack spells make him risky to use against enemies that absorb elemental magic, since he could just heal them instead of hurting them. And the three Organization members Sora fights multiple times through the story each absorb one of these elements.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Marluxia's second form is surprisingly easy and simplistic considering that it's the Final Boss in the GBA version. He doesn't have access to any Sleights (which makes it very easy to Card Break him) and his attacks, while damaging, are fairly predictable.
• Awesome Art: The GBA game's pixel art was of excellent quality back in the day, representing the characters pretty much perfectly in 2D, and still hold up very well today.
• Breather Boss:
  • Oogie Boogie is so pathetically easy in both versions, even for an early-game boss, that he borders on Zero-Effort Boss. The card system does not work in his favor in the slightest, as breaking his cards not only completely prevents his attacks, but also lowers the gate he hides behind, and once you break three cards he's completely helpless against the beating he's going to receive...and that's if you don't pick up one of the many Gimmick cards the dice give when destroyed, which lowers the gate instantly and stuns the boss. Many players don't even know that he can summon Heartless or heal himself simply because he's dead before he gets the chance to do so.
  • Larxene's second boss fight. While she is not too easy, the encounter is a lot easier than the one just before it. Not so in the PS2 remake, though, where it is just as difficult, if not more so.
• Breather Level: The 100 Acre Wood has no enemies bar an encounter with bees in a mini-game and a trove of new, free cards and Sleight combinations.
• Broken Base: The game's card-based battle system is highly controversial. Some fans complain that managing cards in the middle of a battle is frustrating, the deck building aspect has a steep learning curve, and the game becomes unbearably easy once the player learns to spam certain combos. Others enjoy it because it keeps the basics of the franchise's combat while also encouraging players to experiment until they find the strategy that best suits their play style, and argue that learning the intricacies of the battle system makes for a very rewarding experience.
• Cheese Strategy: As demonstrated by Stickman Sham, you can combine the Maleficent card with the effects of Lexaeus's Level 1 charge to deal immense amounts of damage to him with Dark Aura. The key behind this strategy is having Halloween Town be the last world you visit before fighting Lexaeus.
• Demonic Spiders: Neoshadows. Every battle with one usually involves their stupid spinning attack that hits you 95% of the time and does a buttload of damage, they usually spam 7s and 8s everywhere, and when they're not doing that they're hiding underground, completely invulnerable to damage. Riku gets the Lexaeus Card in the final level for a reason.
• Disappointing Last Level: The final Floor in Riku's story is exactly three rooms long. You can literally just walk through the final dungeon to the Final Boss without fighting a single Heartless.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While the gameplay itself is contested, the actual story of Chain of Memories is rather interesting with its growing mystery, Sora's All-Loving Hero status being seriously tested at points and introducing several members of Organization XIII that would go on to become highly popular characters. This, combined with the fact that players who dive straight into Kingdom Hearts II will be very confused as to why Sora isn't immediately playable, makes many argue that Chain of Memories' story is at least worth sitting through.
• Epileptic Trees: Union X retroactively created one of these concerning the Final Boss of Re:Chain of Memories, which takes place on the back of a giant "ship", with a feminine specter holding Marluxia's scythe as the centerpiece of the arena. Many fans have latched onto the theory that the spectre is actually Strelitzia, based on the figure's uncanny resemblance to her and the fact that Marluxia's scythe is based on an actual strelitiza. An April 2020 story update only poured more fuel to the fire on this theory, given Strelitzia's appearance in a white coat bearing more than a passing resemblance to the spectre, as well as her suspiciously specific dialogue throughout the cutscene.
• Fan Nickname: The Riku Replica is occasionally referred to as "Repliku". It's even his official name in the D-Report in the German version.
• Franchise Original Sin: While Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories was fairly well-received and popular enough to get an Updated Re-release, it embodied a number of controversial trends that would get out of hand in later installments.
  • The decision to publish on a different console. COM was released for the Game Boy Advance instead of the PlayStation 2 like the first game; this was considered acceptable if not ideal in 2004 since the GBA was the only widespread handheld, so if there had to be a spinoff there were few other options. The game is also arguably not required viewing to understand Kingdom Hearts II. However, over time more of these handheld "spinoffs" were released ("spinoffs" in quotes because they were actually critical to the Myth Arc all along, COM included) on competing systems; when all was said and done, playing every game on release and avoiding the Continuity Lockout required five different dedicated gaming consoles and a compatible Japanese cellphone. Remakes and remasters have rectified this; as of 2019 you only need a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One to experience basically the entire series^note To be fair, the two Nintendo DS installments are presented as cutscene compilations and not proper games. The second mobile game, meanwhile, does not appear in the compilations but is still very accessible thanks to its Android/iOS compatibility. as well as Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory. That said, Melody of Memory is also on the Nintendo Switch, where none of the other games were playable until 2021... unless you have a bad internet connection as all the games are only available via streaming.
  • Introducing several original characters, removing focus from the Disney and Final Fantasy elements that brought people in. This was cool at the time since nobody knew what to expect of the new bad guys, but the continual shift led to a Broken Base as to whether downplaying these elements was a good move for a series built on those franchises. This only became a bigger issue over time, to the point of Kingdom Hearts III having no choice but to focus on original characters to the extent that no Final Fantasy characters appear.
  • Confusing plot decisions and elaborations on the rules of the setting. Kingdom Hearts only engaged with the universe's laws on a superficial level, so Willing Suspension of Disbelief fills in the gaps just fine. COM, on the other hand, introduces new rules without clearly explaining them, such as memories and their relationship to the heart and some odd changes to the definition of darkness. The new characters are also kept mysterious through the end of the game. At the time, everyone knew that Kingdom Hearts II was on the way and assumed that it would clear all of this up. And it did...only to introduce just as much confusion about other things in the process. And it just kept going from there, reaching Mind Screw levels by Kingdom Hearts 3D [Dream Drop Distance], which introduces a thoroughly confusing version of time travel to the series. Kingdom Hearts III was another breaking point; it depends so heavily on the inner workings of the games' universe that it must further strain disbelief as an anime boy discusses fairy tale metaphysics with Mickey Mouse.
  • This game completely recycles the Disney worlds and characters of the original game; the only new worlds are originals which, due to plot contrivances, aren't deeply explored anyway. There are several reasons this was accepted: the plot's memory-based premise gave it a reasonable explanation; the new gameplay and different visual style kept the experience fresh; and it was obvious that the game was a gateway title to encourage adoption of the PS2 ahead of Kingdom Hearts II. But after this, subsequent games kept on recycling worlds, characters, and scenarios to some degree or another. While this attracted plenty of complaints, it was slightly less noticeable with a few years between games. Today, a first-time player working through the PS4 all-in-one collection will literally visit Agrabah and Olympus five times each on the same disc.
  • A totally different gameplay style. The Game Boy Advance was simply too weak to reasonably emulate the first game's gameplay—while there were complaints over the card game system, it was understood that change was necessary. However, when replicating the original gameplay on handhelds did become possible, the handheld entries continued to experiment anyway, meaning players had to learn intricate new and less refined systems from scratch each game.
• Game-Breaker: On the series's page, here.
• Genius Bonus: In the manga adaptation, Larxene is seen reading a book about French writer Marquis De Sade. Since he's the Trope Namer for sadism, it's certainly a fitting choice for her.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Any enemy you have to attack from behind is a pain in the Game Boy Advance game. The 2D environment is very unforgiving with letting you get into position, so you have to somehow get right behind you target to do damage.
  • The game introduces three more Heartless whose seeming purpose is to be annoying the player: Creeper Plant, Crescendo^note also named Loudmouth in Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days, and Kingdom Hearts χ, and Tornado Step.
    • Creeper Plants not only have a terrible tendency to inflict Card Breaks on you at the start of the game and shoot seeds at you, but they can also compensate for their stationary position by sprouting their roots from underneath you, causing you to fall flat as it plucks you off of Moogle Points.
    • Crescendos may be weak, but they appear in groups with stronger Heartless, using their horn to heal them and calling for reinforcements, which makes them difficult to slay as their stronger allies will mop the floor with you while doing so.
    • Tornado Steps are the least annoying of the three, but no less of a pain. They can smash at you with the hands sprouting from their heads and charge at you with a spinning attack that causes heavy damage if it connects.
  • Neoshadows. They also have a tendency to turn two-dimensional and avoid everything you throw at them. This is especially annoying because they seem to wait right until you use a Sleight.
• Good Bad Bugs: Riku's "double jump glitch" in the Game Boy Advance version. When you double-jump into an attack, Riku will jump down at his enemy and hit them several times. If an attack modifier like Overdrive or Berserk is in effect, it will be applied to this combo without depleting its number of uses.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • When he's defeated for good, Marluxia weakly utters "So this...this is the heart of a hero!" before perishing, which is retroactively made sad by the fact he was once both a hero and Keyblade wielder.
  • After Sora's battle with Marluxia, Riku Replica leaves. Try rewatching the scene after playing Reverse/Rebirth mode, where you see what happens to him. Remember what happens to him by the end of Reverse/Rebirth? Guess what, meeting the real Riku was what he wanted to do all along. Yeah...
  • Vexen's shockingly brutal death was mitigated somewhat by the "Can't feel real emotions" tidbit from Kingdom Hearts II, but when Dream Drop Distance reveals Nobodies can regrow hearts and experience emotions, it becomes just as bad if not worse than it first was, because Vexen was legitimately terrified at the thought of dying. The same game also somewhat alleviates this scene because it reveals that Vexen was reborn as his old self after his "death," and considering what Xemnas originally intended for the Organization, Axel practically did Vexen a favor.
  • While being confronted by DiZ disguised as Ansem in Twilight Town, Riku immediately declares "You're not the true Ansem." While correct within the context of that conversation, we find out how overall wrong he is in Kingdom Hearts II.
  • In the first fight against Ansem in the GBA version, it plays "The 13th Struggle." "Ansem" is later revealed to be a member of the real Organization XIII.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • The level of support that Donald, Goofy, and Jiminy Cricket give Sora throughout the story. When he tells them about Naminé, they're willing to keep going through Castle Oblivion with him to rescue her, even though it's becoming increasingly obvious that this is a dangerous thing to do. And when Sora eventually chews them out and abandons them, they don't turn around and go home, though they'd have every right to do that. They forgive him and come back to save him just in time with no strings attached.
  Goofy: Any friend of yours is a friend of ours! Let's go help Naminé!
  • When visiting the 100 Acre Woods, even though it was based on figments of Sora's memories, Sora did not need to introduce or "reintroduce" himself to Pooh who already knows who Sora is and Sora did not react. Harsher in Hindsight when Pooh forgot Sora in Kingdom Hearts II instead.
  • Sora forgiving Naminé for lying to him and taking apart his memories, cheering her up because he wants her to be happy, and even suggesting that once his memories are fixed, he wants them to become friends for real. This act of kindness gives Naminé the courage to stand up to Marluxia and refuse to hurt Sora anymore.
  • Riku, preparing to go into a final fight with Ansem where he will either conquer the darkness or be consumed by it, asks Mickey for a favor. He starts to tell Mickey that if he should fail he wants Mickey to put him down, but Mickey cuts him off and says that of course he'll rescue Riku from the darkness. And when Riku tries to correct him, Mickey makes it clear he's not misunderstanding, he's refusing to give up on his friend.
    • Cemented even further in Riku's ending when he and King Mickey end up on a First-Name Basis because, per Mickey himself, "We're pals!"
  • When Sora is panicking over the news that the Organization is holding Naminé prisoner, it's Donald who explains to Goofy how Sora's feeling and indicates that he would feel the same way if it were him. It's a nice change of pace from their typical Vitriolic Best Buds relationship.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Larxene's voice actor, Shanelle Gray, also narrated some of the Wendy's commercials around the time of Re:Chain of Memories's English release. Then, during the cutscene just before fighting her a second time,
    Larxene: Okay... Have it your way. ^note That is the tagline of Burger King. More pain for you means more fun for me!
  • Lexaeus telling Vexen to "let it go". Sora also says the same line during his first confrontation with Larxene. Then comes Kingdom Hearts III where not only is Frozen a world there, but Larxene herself makes an appearance.
  • Marluxia, who has a Grim Reaper motif, is voiced by Keith Ferguson, who would later go on to be the voice of the similarly-themed Reaper in Overwatch.
  • In the Japanese dub of the remake, there's some ironic humor in that Marluxia (i.e. the guy who can inflict Time-Delayed Death on you) says "Nani?!" whenever he's card-broken. Bonus points if the sleight you used to break him was Lethal Frame, and he's at low enough HP for it to finish him off.
  • The gameplay is card-based. The next game introduced Luxord, an Organization XIII member that uses cards as his weapon of predilection.
  • Axel's line before fighting Sora the second time refers to how, despite not wanting to fight him, he holds his status in the Organization with high regard, going as far to say he 'can't dishonor' them. Come Dream Drop Distance, he's their biggest Spanner in the Works.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: One of the main complaints against the remake is that the remake kept the Fight Like a Card Player gameplay. The card game combat was originally designed because they could not do traditional Kingdom Hearts gameplay on the GBA, so keeping it in the fully-3D remake felt like a waste of potential when they could have just retconned the whole game to play like Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts II instead.
• Love to Hate: Marluxia, Larxene, and Axel are evil, yes, but their outstanding personalities (Marluxia being manipulative and attempting to claim control of the entire Organization, Larxene and her sadism as well as her sass, and Axel's bombastic deliveries and fun attitude) are something for people to enjoy, even as they beat the daylights out of them.
• Memetic Molester:
  • Larxene is this for some. She apparently has no concept of personal space for both sexes, and is shown to be a sadist.
  • Marluxia. He gets up way too close to Naminé, and how she flinches when he touches her shoulder and how she's generally pretty scared of him does not help at all.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page.
• Narm:
  • While Marluxia dies in the remake, he has this extremely obnoxious yell that makes it sound like he's taking the biggest crap of his life, which tends to make people laugh while he dies.
  • Some of the other voice acting can be this in the English dub. Even though the direction is okay for most of the cast, Sora has some really stilted dialogue, especially when the subtitles have a dash/"-" line where he pauses. This is all due to the game not getting its mouth movements reanimated for the dub, as it was more than likely a smaller project, being a 3D remake and all, so the actors had to match the Japanese timings rather than do their own timings of the lines. He's not the only one to be affected, though.
  • Sora's voice also sounds exactly the same as it did in KHII, due to the remake being made after it, where the original version used Haley Joel Osment's sound clips from the first game, which creates a disconnect that would also be in Dream Drop Distance, since Sora isn't in his KHII body.
  • By far, the character most affected by this trope has to be Mickey Mouse, though. In the remake, you can hear Wayne Allwine clearly struggling to both deliver Mickey's lines convincingly while also having to dub over the footage to match the Japanese timings rather than having the freedom to say them at his own speed like the other games he was in. Allwine wasn't an anime dub actor and it showed in this game's remake, since most of the other actors do much better at delivering their lines. His rough performance is exacerbated by the fact that he was literally dying of diabetes at the time of recording.
• No Yay: Marluxia and Naminé. Believe it or not, there are quite a number of fanarts about them. Also, Riku and "Ansem", in particular the scene where "Ansem" advances on Riku, talking about how he's going to invade his heart, while Riku desperately tries to fight back.
• Paranoia Fuel: You know that big crystal ball in the room where Marluxia, Larxene, and Axel talk about their plans? They use it to see everything going on in Castle Oblivion. So the three of them are watching everything you do throughout the whole game.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: As it turns out, it is entirely possible to beat Re:Chain of Memories while only using a single card deck.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The Fight Like a Card Player battle system has few fans, being unintuitive, limiting, and often adding Fake Difficulty. It's even worse when playing as Riku, because his story removes deck-building — y'know, that thing that's the reason people like card battles in the first place?
  • Farming Moogle Points is tedious and unfun, because they only come from interacting with environment objects, and not from winning battles. You can sell old cards instead, but that's hardly better — most of your cards are bought from the Moogle Shops in the first place, and the free ones mostly come from interacting with environment objects. Fortunately there are twice the alternatives for gaining Moogle Points: Aladdin's Sandstorm attack and environmental interaction in 100 Acre Wood. Not slipping on the Bouncywild's banana peels or getting hit with the Creeper Plant's root needle attack though, because then you'd have to go and retrieve the ones you've lost.
    • Moogle Points farming got even worse in the remake since Square Enix thought it would be a good idea to Nerf that by not only making the orbs that grant said points no longer have their value scale with each succeeded floor, but make it so that destructible objects stay destroyed and indestructible ones only drop prizes the first time when hit/interacted with as long as Sora stays on that floor. Fortunately though, both of the alternatives mentioned above seemed to have remained intact, if not more viable than ever.
  • Riku-exclusive one, but while Dark Mode is very powerful, the fact that it cancels the effect of the card or sleight used to activate the form can be annoying, especially if you're trying to use a Mickey Card or Sleight to heal and accidentally break an enemy card, you enter Dark Mode but don't get healed, and since the Mickey cards are the best form of healing that Riku has outside of the single-use Oogie Boogie card, this can possibly get you killed.
• Signature Song: "Lord of the Castle", Marluxia's final boss theme from the remake, is easily the most well-known of the few original songs composed for the game. It would later return twice in III, solidifying it as the default theme of the character.
• Surprise Difficulty: The Bumble-Rumble fight in the 100-Acre Wood. The goal is to fight off 50 swarms of bees without letting Pooh's HP run out. This is, unfortunately, obnoxiously difficult due to being stuck with a fixed Deck mostly comprised of middle to low numbers and the bees coming in packs and carrying cards as high as 8. Your only reprieve is that you can use any Sleight you've already learned, plus two special Sleights that involve the exclusive Hunny card.
• That One Achievement:
  • In the remake, filling out the Card Collection to get the Gold and Platinum Cards, and thus the Card Master Sora trophy in 1.5 HD ReMIX. Enemy Card drop rates are notoriously bad. You'll spend a lot of time grinding out the same enemy over and over again to just fill out a single card slot, and every enemy has an Enemy Card. Until 2018, when the random number generator that determines enemy card drops was cracked, making it take only an hour or so to get them all if using a guide.
  • The Expert Deck Builder trophy requires editing a deck on 500 separate occasions. Not 500 changes to the deck: 500 times entering the deck editor, making a change, and then exiting out to the Review Deck menu. A typical player might edit their deck 20 to 50 times throughout the game. Getting to 500 doesn't take long with dedicated effort, but it's horrendously tedious.
• That One Boss:
  • Vexen. The original Chain of Memories requires that you attack him from behind — this is harder in the original than it is in the remake because of the perspective only allowing characters to face left or right. In the remake, his attacks are pretty hard to dodge and can stunlock, he still can't be attacked from the front, and his deck is stacked with high-numbered attack-cards. He also has Elixirs and Hi-Ethers with him, making the strategy of breaking all his good cards hard to execute — especially in the rematch, in which he also owns a card that prevents breaking items. In both versions, he has a card that revives him once with a little bit of health if he dies, artificially extending the fight.
  • Larxene zips around the battlefield, making it difficult to catch up to her and hit her. She also spams multi-hit ranged attacks using mostly high number cards that are near impossible to dodge constantly, which makes the use of the zero card breaking strategy useless against her as she'll kill you long before she ever gets to the point it would work.
  • The fourth fight against Riku Replica in Sora's story, as he loves to spam his sleights and uses his own enemy card (which prevents him from losing the first sleight card for 5 sleights). Additionally, Sora doesn't have access to any friend cards during this battle, as he ran away from Donald and Goofy before he entered Destiny Islands.
  • Trickmaster is already an annoying boss due to the table mechanic, but it gets worse in Reverse/Rebirth. Riku's deck in Wonderland is made up of just 9 cards, with none of them having a value higher than 5. This makes it very difficult to break anything Trickmaster throws at you without stocking cards.
• That One Level:
  • Wonderland is probably one of the worst levels in Reverse/Rebirth due to Riku's unique deck system. He is only given 9 attack cards for the world, forcing you to play extremely conservatively with Sleights lest you run out of cards quickly. This also makes an already hard boss fight against the Trickmaster much harder, since Sleight-spamming can't be done. While you are given the Powerwild card (reverses card values) to alleviate the deck's problem with low card numbers, it doesn't last very long and will run out during the boss fight.
  • Also on Riku's mode, Twilight Town. Mickey isn't with you, meaning you have only one real form of healing: Regen. While you have a decent deck for dealing with standard enemies and can easily recover your HP with overworld items, the boss of the stage is a nightmare.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Riku's side of the story with regards to the Disney worlds he visits could have had him encountering his interpretations of Sora's allies, or told an original story about his struggle with darkness and/or his abandonment of his friends. Instead, most Disney worlds Riku visits have no cutscenes or story at all; you just fight your way to the boss room, kill them, and leave. To make matters worse, after the first level Riku himself barely has any actual scenes in the hallways of Castle Oblivion until the last three levels, with the Organization being more prominently featured instead.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Some thought Marluxia was a woman due to his long pink hair and rather feminine appearance. He was originally planned to be female, so the confusion is understandable.
  • Vexen was also mistaken for female, thanks to his vaguely feminine appearance and his rather high-pitched voice in the original GBA version (which is pared down to only his laugh in the English release).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The FMVs at the start of Sora's story and at the end of Reverse/Rebirth in Chain of Memories. These are full-blown FMVs, at least PS1 quality, with character models that could almost have been taken directly from the other Kingdom Hearts games. All this from the equivalent of a slightly more powerful hand-held SNES. Just don't play it on a GBA player - the rest of the game scales very well to the big screen. The FMVs on the other hand...

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